Afleveringen
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There are many, many choices for cloud database services these days. I would hope everyone is aware of the various IaaS options in public clouds with EC2, Azure VMs, GCP Compute Engine, and others. These are often the easiest way to move your workload, but you've really just moved a VM from one place to another (likely more expensive) place.
For managed databases, there are lots of choices, but you might not be aware of your options. I ran across an article that discusses the various flavors of managed databases in the big three public clouds for SQL Server. In the piece, there is a section that talks about when a managed database makes sense. I like that it discloses the development on a managed service is expensive.
Read the rest of The Managed Cloud Database Options
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Starbucks has too many order combinations. This article about the challenges for their new CEO notes there are over 170,000 combinations of things customers can order. As someone who has visited a store often and stood behind someone placing an order, that sounds like an accurate number. Sometimes I hear people order things to drink that I had no idea were even possible.
When there are too many choices, sometimes there can be a delay as the person tries to process the information and make a decision. Some people can't make a decision. Others enjoy the variety and keep making different decisions each time. That's fine if you're visiting a restaurant, but it's less useful if you're building software.
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I caught this post about a career presentation from Kendra Little and it resonated a bit with me. The summary of the post (it's a bit long) is that there is valuable work that supports and benefits a team of people, called glue work. However, glue work isn't necessarily technical and it isn't necessarily recognized as valuable by management. In fact, it might unintentionally lead you from a career in engineering to one in project management.
I haven't been someone who has been marginalized in positions, who has been taken for granted or expected to do certain tasks. I think some people get taken advantage of, and this is especially true for women, who both volunteer more and are volunteered by others more for these tasks. While I have been quick to document decisions or actions, and sometimes help out with project work, I do that in addition to any technical work. I've felt that as a developer, my job is to produce code. If I can help with other things, then I'm a Developer+, but I ultimately know that code my clients can use is what matters.
Read the rest of Adding the Right Value
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For the last few years, we've seen no shortage of cloud migration stories and felt pressure from management who wanted to migrate our systems to the cloud. It seems that almost everyone I speak to has a story of having to move a system out of their owned or leased data center into a public cloud from some vendor. A lot of this is the movement of VMs from one place to another, which has me scratching my head. If we're just running VMs, surely we can do this cheaper in our own data center.
Perhaps, though there are a lot of costs to setting up or running a data center, and it's not easy getting a system in place that allows a bit of self-service for our customers. Especially while ensuring that images used are properly patched and secured, while ensuring lots of easy connectivity to storage that can be reconfigured easily. It might not be worth the effort for a few dozen VMs, but if you have hundreds of systems, maybe it is.
Read the rest of The Rise of Data Centers Centers
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Read the rest of The Learning Plan for 2025
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I was chatting with a friend recently about routines and some of the helpful or silly things we do. I mentioned that when I played adult baseball, we often had Sunday morning games and a routine of mine was to drive to town, stop at a 7-11, and get a large cup of coffee and an apple fritter. It was a comforting habit that I still have today, often stopping when I have a morning flight to do the same thing in the way to the airport.
Only in Denver though, not when I'm flying out of other cities and returning home.
Read the rest of Comforting Habits
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I went to San Francisco for Small Data SF, a conference sponsored by Mother Duck. The premise of the event was that smaller sets of data are both very useful and prevalent. The manifesto speaks to me, as I am a big fan of smaller sets of data for sure. I also think that most of the time we can use less data than we think we need, especially when it's recent data. That often is more relevant and we end up with contorted queries that try to weight new or old data differently to reflect this. Maybe the best line for me is this one:
Bigger data has an opportunity cost: Time.
Read the rest of Big Data or Small Data
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When I was younger, I had a variety of jobs, but in most of the positions I had to work hard for stretches. Really hard, as in more than 8 hours a day or 40 hours a week. Often as I was starting a new position, it took some time for me to develop some understanding, some skill, and some muscle memory. In some jobs, especially in restaurants, I also had to build the physical skills to be on my feet for many hours.
In technology, I've often found myself unsure of how to approach a new position, aware I had knowledge gaps about how things worked, and often, I was naïve or ignorant of some piece of technology my employer used. Even at jobs where I started as a developer or DBA on a known platform (ASP or SQL Server), I sometimes encountered some aspects of the technology that I hadn't used in the past (like clustering).
Read the rest of Learning to Grind
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I was asked this question recently: is it more likely that AI will replace humans or assist them in their work?
It's a good question. If you think about the way AI is being hyped in 2024, many people think AI is, or will soon be, replacing people and we need less of them in work. I guess the simplified view is that AI can do the jobs of many people, but I'm not sure the world is that simple. What I think is more likely is that AI becomes a lever that assists a few people in getting more work done and potentially replacing other, less knowledgable humans.
Read the rest of The AI/Human Spectrum
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It seems there's quite a dichotomy in the technology workforce. On one hand I hear about the Great Resignation where many employees are leaving their jobs because of RTO (return to office) mandates or some other dissatisfaction with their job. On the other, I've seen quite a few people who were laid off and are struggling to find new positions. On the third hand, there is no shortage of companies who report they are struggling to find and hire talented people for some positions.
I don't quite know what to think, but I do know that employment seems to be harder to come by. If you are looking for a job, I believe you need your own sustainable learning plan. If your organization can't find qualified talented staff, then the organization definitely needs a continuous learning plan.
Read the rest of Continuous Learning
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I was listening to someone at Microsoft talk about their product recently. I can't disclose which one it was, but lots of people use this product and are impacted by changes. The particular thing that caught my attention was that the presenter noted there was a breaking change in the new version for some people. This wasn't a huge change or one that would affect a lot of people, but it was a breaking change for a few.
Another attendee asked this question: I would tend to do xxx instead of what you showed, so why would you do this?
Read the rest of Why Would You Do That?
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I was watching a video called Microservices are Technical Debt. In it, the person being interviewed said that a lot of people really have a distributed monolith. That caught my eye since I've worked with a number of customers who are trying to adopt microservice architectures for their applications. I think this is less a performance/scaling choice than a reworking of their software development teams, and I'm not sure they will end up with a better system.
What is a distributed monolith? I am not an expert, but this appears to be a place where all the services still depend on each other. For example, I might have a service getting user profile info that an app calls, with another service getting previous orders, and a third service that returns inventory. In a monolith, if any of these are down, the others don't work. In a distributed monolith, these might be built independently, but perhaps the core app/web page still requires all these to be working to show the user something.
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There are lots of software development methodologies. This page lists a few, among them waterfall, agile, iterative, rapid, and more. What's been interesting to me is that the process of deciding what to code and then whether it works doesn't change much between different ways of building software.
Instead, the cycle time between when we ask a client what to do and when we deliver it changes. The more agile/lean we are, the lower the cycle time. The more waterfall-ish, the larger the cycle time. I guess that analysis and breakdown of problems into work also changes, as the scope in modern DevOps styles of development is smaller (more contained) than in waterfall.
Read the rest of Reducing the Cycle Time
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I've been very pleased with the direction of SSMS the last few years. As it's been separated from SQL Server releases and gets updated more often, I think the changes from v17 though v20 have been improvements. There are still issues, but it's been better. Now we finally have SSMS moving to a modern shell with the v21 preview and I'm excited to see how this changes the future of our tooling.
However, the PM for SSMS, Erin Stellato, posted a note on LinkedIn recently asking why people don't read documentation. She also asks what you want to see in 21, so respond if you think there are holes in the SSMS docs. I think this post came about because of many responses that came from people who clearly hadn't read some documentation.
Read the rest of Doing a Little Research
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Thanksgiving is tomorrow in the US and it is supposed to be a holiday when we give thanks for our blessings in life. My wife usually has everyone in our family tell what they are thankful for this year. I also see many people posting things they are grateful for during the month of December.
Last month I was lucky enough to have dinner with Bob Ward and we were talking about some of the things we'd seen in travels, often some stressful times for ourselves or others. We've seen many people get upset or angry or have some other reaction. Both of us have some empathy for others, recognizing that we don't really know their history or experiences, and it doesn't make sense for us to get upset. If we knew those things, we might better understand the reaction that someone displays to a situation.
Read the rest of Have Grace
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I was a bit of a math nerd in high school and college. Some of you might have been as well, but I took advanced math all through high school, culminating with AP Calculus as a senior with 11 other kids (of about 320). In college, I started with Calculus III freshman year and went on to take 7 more semesters of various high level maths. One of those classes included analyzing data with linear regression, which we did with hand calculators and formulae.
At SQL Saturday Pittsburgh 2024, I watched a talk from Jeff Moden on linear regression. It was a trip down memory lane, with Jeff explaining how the process worked, the flaws, and how this technique could be used to do some predictions on data stored in SQL Server. It was a great session on the topic, but I liked that Jeff showed how you can use SQL Server to do various math calculations that might be useful to analyze data. I see applications sometimes programming various formulas, but I don't often see people doing this in database queries.
Read the rest of Computer Algebra
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Read the rest of New SQL Server 2022 Functions
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In most of the organizations I've worked for or consulted with, patching was always a challenge. Patching hasn't usually been given a priority and is often skipped when operations staff is busy. This has resulted in lots of un-patched, or slowly patched systems. I assume this is one reason Microsoft continues to release RTM-GDR patches because some people won't patch at all unless there are critical fixes.
I also know that much of IT management sees patching systems like patching parking lots. Needs to be done, but tomorrow, after we do other important work today.
Read the rest of How Do You Patch 100 Database Servers?
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